Category: hiring

Be What You Intend to Be

Much of what goes on in a traditional organization is unintentional. That is to say, it isn’t an action that someone has decided to take in order to contribute to the well-being of that organization and its stakeholders. It’s operating on default.

Ironically, unintentional behavior can often be the result of trying to clamp down on unintentional behavior. On the other hand, it can just as easily be the result of leaving people isolated and expecting them to do their best work without any assistance or support.

The road to a more intentional organization is one described ideologically by business greats from Warren Buffett to Richard Branson. Here is the idea as verbalized by Steve Jobs:

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea is counter to the operation of a traditional organization. Traditionally, decisions get made and orders pushed down the chain of command; results come back up and get pieced into something like the final result that the person at the top of the chain wanted.

Counter-intuitively, the result of the traditional approach is that much of what happens in the organization is unintentional. People who wait for orders don’t make the best use of their own time; and the people above them, who don’t have the perspective of each individual’s point of view, don’t make the best use of their time either. People fulfill their immediate expectations without a view of what’s good for the whole. What’s more, managers often don’t communicate all their expectations, and the results reflect the holes in each subordinate’s understanding of the tasks assigned to him.

Becoming intentional means, at least in part, understanding myself, acknowledging and accepting what I am, and developing upon my strengths. As in the Cherokee proverb of the two wolves, I become better by feeding what is good within me. It’s not a choice I make when I’m faced with a hard question, it’s a choice I make by the way I condition myself to face the hundreds of little choices throughout the day.

The same is true of an organization: I have to feed what is best in my organization and what is best in the individuals within it.

This is one reason organizations that focus on facilitation can be much more effective than traditional organizations. Instead of “managing” in the traditional sense, leaders help people to do and become their best, guiding their individual work toward the ultimate good of the organization as a whole and helping to connect it to the work of others.

What this means for a leader is that I am first of all responsible to my people rather than for them. (Responsibility for my people is still important, though it’s mostly externally-facing: followers want leaders to have their backs.)

Whereas a traditional organization is merely, as Emerson put it, “the lengthened shadow of one man,” an organization of facilitation is an attempt to leverage the power of community toward a common goal. That makes the intent of each individual important to the whole. Each level is intentional about its own goals and behaviors, and each subsequent level is there to help the previous level attain its goals and bind efforts together.

Here are a few risk factors for unintended behavior, and what you can do about them:

  • Fear. When people are afraid of something, they tend to either destroy it or hide it. I have never seen either of these behaviors yield positive results in an organization. If the people working with you act fearfully, address it head-on. Learn what they are afraid of. Dig into the root cause, too–few people are afraid of disappointing a customer so much as they’re afraid of what might happen to them. If you start to notice a lot of people having similar problems, you have a systemic fear on your hands–usually one that has to do with trust within the organization–that requires a change.
  • Inconsistent culture. People are more willing to take personal risks if they feel anchored and supported. That has partly to do with knowing that the people around them have their back–even people who may be on a different team, or come from a very different background. Your hiring practices and cultural guidelines need to be spelled out so that the people you hire are people you’d choose to weather a crisis, not just people who would have fun together at happy hour. More than that, everyone in your organization needs to be telling the same story and believe in the same destiny.
  • Too much process. Process can be a good thing if done correctly–if the process represents a best practice, serves the people, and is capable of evolving. But if you need a process to mitigate risk, that means you already have unintended behaviors–and adding a process could make the issue worse, as people attempt to short-cut or circumvent the process in order to get their work done. (Ask yourself: Is the process an invention or a control?) Pare down or eliminate any processes that get in the way of doing good work, and instead focus on gaining buy-in from your ostensibly reliable (you did hire them, right?) employees as to how to avoid putting your community at unnecessary risk.
  • Over-management. If responsibility for my efforts always goes up to my manager, my natural human response is to fight against that control mechanism. I might give up on doing anything that isn’t assigned to me, I might deliberately procrastinate or slack off, or I might start looking for other jobs. (The top cause of burnout isn’t over-working, it’s lacking control over or engagement with your work.)1 A quote from a study in the Indian Journal of Industrial Relations: “Burnout can be minimized/avoided if individuals develop a high level of involvement in their jobs and they are able to identify themselves psychologically with their jobs.” Adding controls and oversight to prevent me from doing anything but the work I’m supposed to be doing will provoke a desire to rebel against them. Try cutting out levels of management and finding ways to prevent micromanagement, or better yet, train your “hierarchy” to be a facilitating structure instead of a managing structure. If you have good people, you won’t need to control them; and if you stop controlling them, you’ll find out pretty quickly who’s good and who isn’t.

The only way you’re going to get more than a handful of people to be fully engaged in accomplishing a goal is to get them to buy into that goal and work toward it on their own motivation. In other words, hire good people and let them tell you what to do. Think of it this way: As long as I hold the power to fire my leader, what do I lose by being a servant?

What reservations do you have about making this kind of change? Did I miss something? I’m looking forward to getting your reactions in the comments.

References

References
⇧1  A quote from a study in the Indian Journal of Industrial Relations: “Burnout can be minimized/avoided if individuals develop a high level of involvement in their jobs and they are able to identify themselves psychologically with their jobs.”

Nourish the Unexpected: Facilitating Emergence

It’s not quite enough to stop controlling in order for the people in your organization to do self-managed, unprecedented work. Facilitating their work is also critically important.

Facilitation nourishes and encourages people in several ways. It feeds the part of us that wants independence and mastery because a more experienced manager/co-worker is helping us with a goal instead of exercising command over it. It feeds the part of us that wants social validation: if someone is helping us accomplish a goal, it tells us the goal is worth accomplishing. It even feeds the part of us that’s lazy–that is, the part that wants to accomplish our goals while using the smallest amount of energy possible.

Think of your organization as a computer:

Algorithmic Containmentphoto credit: Algorithmic Contaminations via photopin (license)

A computer is highly structured, functional, and hierarchical, but in order to continue running the latest software, it has to be continually upgraded and redesigned. A computer doesn’t grow on its own. This is the traditional organizational model.

Now think of your organization as a garden, growing all kinds of plants:

English gardensphoto credit: Gardens at Canons Ashby via photopin (license)

You can select the kinds of plants to grow, you can fertilize and water them to help them grow faster (but not too much or it will choke them), and you can trellis them to help them grow in a certain way, and you can prune them when they grow in ways that aren’t fruitful. Plants in a garden grow on their own, but left untended, weeds will sprout up and diseases will take hold and some plants won’t receive enough nutrients.

(Doesn’t this second metaphor sound like your organization already? Why do we so often feel like we need the additional layer of inorganic structure, except that we want an illusion of control that we don’t actually have?)

Facilitation is the art of pruning, trellising, weeding, hedging, fertilizing, and helping your organization grow. You don’t order a pear tree to blossom, you don’t command bees to pollinate, you don’t provide tomatoes with minimum production quotas. You also don’t give them these initiatives and then go back inside your house and expect everything to work unless you’re told otherwise.

A similar approach can be used to grow your organization.

Consider an example of a great gardener: Brian Grazer, movie and television producer and co-founder of Imagine Entertainment. Grazer’s preference to ask questions and make requests rather than give orders helps gain buy-in, makes people feel respected, and allows him room to doubt his knowledge without being hands-off. As a leader, he uses questions and requests as a form of trellising, guiding people to grow in a certain direction rather than commanding them to do so.

The kind of gardener you become is up to the specifics of your situation. So long as you’re seeking to grow your people and your organization, you will treat them with care and make sure they have the resources, support, and guidance they need to grow in the way that’s best for them. Being neglectful and being overattentive both have their hazards.

Have you ever worked with a good “gardener?” What have you learned from these people who dedicate themselves to growing their people, their organizations, and even their strategies?

Hiring for a Unique Culture

Culture is an emergent phenomenon. It exists between the people who make up that particular culture, and evolves based on their interactions–the mythology, folk knowledge, and traditional practices they create and pass between themselves. If you hire based on skill alone, your internal culture will look pretty much like the rest of your industry, because it will be populated with the same kinds of people.

Unlike the Industrial Age, hiring today isn’t picking up a part to put into an already-designed machine to make the machine run. Hiring into an emergent environment only happens when the candidate fits both the current culture and the future culture. Emergent strategy depends on the people within the organization working with and off of one another to yield unplanned results.

Here are a few tweaks to your hiring practices that may yield better results:

  1. Don’t appeal to everybody. Many organizations just want to be liked by everyone. They want to be the place where any individual out there would love to work. Don’t do that. Your organization is unique, and you want people who fit that collective vision and identity. Netflix asserts very clearly that its culture isn’t for everyone, but that is precisely what makes its culture all the more appealing to those who do fit. Figure out now why people wouldn’t want to work in your organization, and you’re on the way to creating a unique and powerful culture.
  2. Fill blind spots, not roles. Roles are a collection of responsibilities and skills that fit a pretty standard definition. Blind spots require a more complete understanding of your team and organization. Simply put, a blind spot is something you need that you don’t have, at the broadest definition that is required (e.g., do you really need someone with three years of Trello experience or do you just need someone who’s comfortable with agile project management?). A blind spot may be a specific competency, like a specific piece of technology, or it may be a tweak to the chemistry of the current team–for example, a more outgoing individual that will facilitate communication between the more introverted members of a remote team. It strips away the expectations that come with hiring someone into a particular role, allowing the new hire to integrate more organically with what’s already going on in your team for the first few months until they have a rhythm going.
  3. Advertise your vision, not your requirements. Anyone who isn’t excited by your specific vision doesn’t belong to your culture. And don’t just advertise the vision of your company. If possible, state succinctly but with enthusiasm what your vision is for the team and even for the specific role. A less-skilled candidate who is energized by the collective vision will be twice as valuable as a more skilled candidate who just wants a new job. And bear in mind that a long list of qualifications belies a search for an interchangeable part. If you want your candidates to get excited about a position, pare it down to your vision and the key blind spots you’re trying to fill. Leave room for the candidate to surprise you.
  4. Interview thoroughly. The hiring process I’ve seen averages two interviews. Google suggests no more than five–and then actually goes on to interview candidates five times, looking for factors including raw skill, problem solving ability, and cultural fit. In an adaptive organization, you’re going to want to take advantage of four or five interviews in order to thoroughly vet the skills, the personality, and the chemistry with the current environment.
  5. Weigh potential. Today the pace of change in technology and the economy means being able to learn what’s needed for the future is more important than having what’s needed in the present. Your people will not only need to adapt as things change, but they will need to create change themselves. And then they will need to live into that change. If the candidate doesn’t have what’s needed to adapt to whatever his role will be in three years, he may not be the best fit.
  6. When in doubt, leave them out. Don’t hire a candidate unless they leave you no other choice–by which I mean, she is such an excellent fit for your organization that you couldn’t bear to let her take another job. Turn away business before hiring someone who doesn’t add to your culture. Adaptive organizations thrive based on the number and quality of connections between employees. Hiring someone who isn’t going to improve your internal network is poison to your long-term goals.
  7. Enlist your recruit’s help. Zappos offers a $2,000 bonus for new hires to quit. The idea is that a new hire will take the money if they don’t feel that they are a good fit for the culture or they don’t believe in the long-term potential of working with the company. In the long run, the occasional $2,000 quitting bonus saves the company a lot of money on people that might otherwise be a drag on the culture. A new-hire quitting bonus might not work for you, but you should still look for ways you can work with a new hire to ensure he’s the right person, and part ways amicably if he’s not.

Filling your organization with effective people who fit with the people around them and are excited about a common vision is the basis of any good culture, not just in an adaptive organization. But because of the importance of emergence in adaptive organizations, getting the mix of people right for your culture is a crucial requirement for success.

EDIT: Reader Brian Gorman offers two additional points to consider: “Having spent more than four decades living in the world of organizational change, I would add two more to his list. 1. Hire for the culture that you want, not the culture that you have. 2. Hire for resilience; you need people who can learn new skills, and shift their mindsets, as your organization continues to change.” I would add a caveat to the first that anyone you hire needs to be able to work in the culture you have today, or she’ll be out the door as soon as she can–which makes finding adaptable people all the more important during a period of change.

Which of these points do you find is most important or illuminating? Are there any important points about hiring for culture that I’ve missed? Do you disagree with my points? I look forward to discussing it with you in the comments.

The Strengths of Adaptive Organizations

While most of my posts can be applied to many different kinds of organizations, and even more can be applied to businesses specifically, I write all my posts with adaptive organizations in mind.

Adaptive organizations are generally loosely-structured, non-hierarchical, and depend on temporary teams to pop up and disband on their own. They’re the primary focus of Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations, as well as the driving philosophy behind the consulting firm Undercurrent.

Adaptive organizations are designed to maximize the co-operation of human and machine. Unlike Industrial Age organizations, adaptive organizations (what Frederic Laloux calls “teal” organizations) do not rely on humans functioning as machines. Instead, they depend on the value created by healthy individuals, collected from diverse backgrounds and bonded into communities by a common vision for the future.

The contrast between the two concepts can be so pronounced that some can’t even fathom how these futuristic organizations would work. But the fact that adaptive organizations are already beginning to emerge (as with Spotify, Valve, and GitHub) shows that they aren’t just a philosophical exercise. They are real, they are successful, and they will continue to thrive.

Laloux outlines three principles of adaptive organizations: self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. While these are incredibly useful guidelines for creating a future organization, they don’t quite explain why adaptive organizations work. I’d like to propose three corollaries to Laloux’s principles.

  1. Traditional organizations rely on planned behavior; adaptive organizations encourage emergent behavior. Traditional organizations are heavily planned: they hire people with specific skill sets to fit into specific roles and accomplish specific tasks that make up a system that’s carefully designed to play out the vision of the entity at the top. This ultimately makes traditional organizations less than the sum of their parts. Adaptive organizations operate at the opposite end of the spectrum: they expect employees to manage themselves and one another dynamically. Fixed hierarchy is counter-productive because it limits deviation from an established agenda; in a fixed hierarchy, I don’t have much room to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit my immediate supervisor, and he in turn has little room to do anything that doesn’t benefit his immediate supervisor. Designing an organization to encourage emergent behavior means opening up to unplanned innovation by anyone at any time. It can be equal parts dangerous and game-changing; the art and science of emergent behavior is to minimize the danger without discouraging the game changers.
  2. Traditional organizations consolidate efforts in an attempt to design the best, most efficient single outcome; future organizations rely on multiple discovery to generate iterative, multi-dimensional innovation. When a traditional organization discovers two different efforts to accomplish a similar goal, it’s seen as inefficient. Duplicative efforts are shut down and/or consolidated into one another, leading to political battles and possibly resentment on the part of the employees who were trumped. These consolidation efforts frequently fail, either in process (they are never completed) or in product (the outcome is too unwieldy or unhelpful). Multiple discovery allows several efforts to reach the same point from multiple directions, or to reach different points from a similar origin. The outcomes of the individual efforts tend to be leaner and more focused, and if one option fails there are others at the ready.
  3. Traditional organizations depend on metric productivity (output divided by hours divided by pay rate); adaptive organizations develop unique value. Metric productivity is the enemy of unique value: it suggests that all products, customers, and employees are comparable and judges each employee against some Platonic ideal of productivity. Metric productivity is what causes us to believe that putting in more hours makes us more valuable to our employer, that what we do to our bodies in our off-hours isn’t important to what happens when we’re on the clock, that our mental and spiritual and social well-being is something we do on our own time and work doesn’t factor into it. But metric productivity isn’t just bad for employees, it’s also a dead end for employers. If your concern is wholly for metric productivity, chances are high that you’re in competition with someone. Competition is a sinkhole. If you’re not digging yourself out of it and creating unique value, you’re bound to lose.

This is how adaptive organizations can thrive in spite of the concerns that keep leaders locked into traditional models. Adaptive organizations eschew the assumptions of traditional organizations–efficiency, competitive pricing, planned behaviors and outcomes–and take the lead because they engage both employees and customers in a way that makes traditional competition obsolete. They also gain efficiencies in unexpected ways–from Buurtzorg spending less time on patients by spending more time with them, to Netflix’s “the best are 10x better than average” philosophy. In the end, adaptive organizations are even better than traditional organizations at traditional metrics, because they focus on purpose and put the future of their organization in the hands of each individual. Instead of focusing on functional planning, an effective leader provides focus, narrative, and inspiration to the efforts of the collective–as Saint-Exupery puts it, she teaches them “to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

This post serves as the frame for my next several posts, in which I’ll tackle multiple discovery and dig further into emergent behavior to provide some practical understanding of how to apply these concepts to a real organization.

What do you believe about adaptive organizations? What’s keeping you from applying these principles to your own organization? I look forward to discussing with you in the comments.

Are Your Taxes Too High?

Many business owners and investors stand squarely on the side of tax cuts. Their belief is that taxes are too high and should be reduced to encourage economic activity. And yet many of them fail to apply the argument to their own nations.

“Wait–taxes?” you say. “I don’t levy taxes.”

With the invention of capitalism, economists re-branded feudal taxation as “harvesting excess value.” But wages can also be seen as a reverse tax on the value produced by workers: where a feudal lord might take a certain amount or percentage, the capitalist allows an employee to keep a certain amount.

This reverse tax was an important invention when capitalism was conceived. It allowed people who didn’t create revenue directly (in the form of crops, manufactured goods, etc.) to create new kinds of value, particularly value that could only be created in concert with other specialists. In turn, workers were given a stable wage and economic and seasonal fluctuations were (in theory) absorbed by the capitalist. So a business became a kind of micro-socialist system within the larger context of capitalism.

Employees are, by and large, grateful for this micro-socialism: generally speaking, employees prefer to have stable paychecks, benefits, and job security–and if they don’t, they can always start their own businesses. But trying to squeeze every cost-saving measure you can out of your employees can be counter-productive, in the same way that increasing taxes can be counter-productive when there aren’t meaningful benefits to match.

While many entrepreneurs face the problem of not paying themselves enough, there are some who pay themselves far too much. And as the size of the company slides upward, owners and executives tend more and more frequently to be out of touch with how much they are taxing their employees–and the cost to their businesses.

This brings up two relevant issues from the world of economics and policy:

  1. What is the appropriate level of taxation to maximize revenue?
  2. What social programs are meaningful enough to justify taxation?

The appropriate level of taxation to maximize revenue follows what is known as the Laffer Curve (although the idea goes back to Arthur Pigou). The basic idea is that tax revenues at 0% and tax revenues at 100% are both zero (which is not entirely accurate, but close enough to be useful). That means that somewhere in between 0% and 100%, there’s a point at which you would receive less revenue if you either increased or decreased taxes, because increasing taxes would discourage revenue-earning activity and decreasing taxes wouldn’t result in substantively more revenue-earning activity.

The second question belies the fact that the peak of the curve can be shifted by many variables–and in fact is always shifting. One of the ways you can create a positive shift–that is, justify increased taxes while also increasing tax revenue–is by implementing meaningful social programs. In the politics, these social programs can be controversial, but in the operation of a business, they are relatively standard: health benefits, flexible hours, etc. They generally fall under the HR umbrella, but can also fit into support departments like printing, IT, and so on.

By this point you may be thinking this over-complicates the issue. The conventional wisdom is that labor is labor, and you compensate people based on the work they do and how well they do it–a simple transaction of value for money.

However, conventional economics has this one wrong. The emerging field of behavioral economics recognizes that not just incentives and disincentives, but context, internal motivations, values, ethics, biases, and other factors affect behavior. When you hire someone, an hour isn’t always an hour. The amount their work is taxed, the context in which they operate, and their emotions toward their work and employer will affect their behavior.

Given this knowledge, you could go with a more libertarian approach–give as much back to your employees as possible–or you could choose to go full socialist.

Lately, many organizations are going full socialist, including The Container Store and Wegmans Food Markets. In addition to providing great benefits, they’ve absorbed nearly all possibility of layoffs, and almost exclusively promote from within rather than recruiting experienced hires.

Netflix employes a different model of socialism: They pay literally top dollar–as much as they would offer to keep you if you got a job offer somewhere else. Management helps you if you’re in a slump, and if your skills just don’t fit the needs of the organization anymore they offer a generous severance package, including placement assistance.

There are two interesting traits in these socialist models: they all experience an increase in revenue that more than makes up for the reduction in employee taxes, and none of them offers the outrageous benefits offered by Google or other Silicon Valley heavyweights.

Which brings us to the question: What makes a meaningful social program (a.k.a. benefit)? Google is famous for having extravagant campuses with free meals, on-site massages, and a host of other benefits. But these only provide minor incremental value because they are simply “free stuff.” The same is true if you give your employees gift cards or tickets to a sports game. These aren’t really fostering a better environment, they’re just “free stuff.”

Meaningful social programs remove obstacles and increase feelings of security and freedom. They promote stability and peace-of-mind, they remove distractions or red tape, and they let you know that if something happens–if you have a child or have to take care of an elderly parent, if you have a bad quarter or even a bad year, etc.–your organization has your back. Each program must have a specific intent behind it that removes worries and stigma, provides a safe environment, or better enables problem solving and innovation. Especially for those who are budgeting a start-up, let these criteria be your guide.

For a lot of people reading this, extravagant social programs won’t be within the realm of possibility anyway. You might already be paying your employees less than they could get somewhere else. But it’s not so much an issue of whether you’re paying them less–so long as they’re able to cover their cost of living–but whether you’re taxing them fairly and giving them the tools they need to close the gap with what they could earn elsewhere. Help them–or sometimes just free them–to create new value and bring in new business. Not every potential employee will be excited about the idea, but the good ones will see the opportunity and jump for it.

There’s a lot more to be learned from macroeconomics and tax theory if you have a large business or your business is growing, but I’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions in the comments.

How to Value Your Diversity

Equal pay for women is a checkmate strategy.

There are two possible schools of thought when it comes to equal pay. One is that women are the same as men; the other is that women are different from men.

If women are the same as men, then they deserve equal pay. This is easy to understand: If women are the same as men with regard to their work, then if business is a meritocracy they deserve to be making the same amount for the same work.

I’m of the camp that women and men are statistically different. (By which I mean you can’t narrow down from the generality to say any one woman is a certain way compared to any one man, but on average women tend toward certain traits and men toward others.) Whether this difference is primarily the product of cultural expectations is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

That women are different and therefore deserve equal pay goes back to my discussion of diversity and innovation. Innovation is recombinant, meaning it requires a diversity of perspectives, values, and opinions that can be synthesized and resolved in new ways, sometimes resulting in entirely new ideas. If women are different from men, this contributes value to the innovation process.

But there’s a problem with unequal pay and the relative value of the individual’s contribution. By setting one person’s pay lower than a peer, you are also setting the relative value of that person’s contribution.

This sounds counter-intuitive to anyone brought up on supply-and-demand economics, which say you’re paying less for the same resource. Yet we’ve seen time and again that the amount you pay for something changes its practical value. If you paid a hundred dollars a month to read my blog posts, even if the product wasn’t substantively changed, you’d be taking these words a lot more seriously. This blog would, in effect, become a different product in your mind.

The same behavior is at play in your employment, even where the actual amounts you’re paying each employee are hidden from each other. The behavior is subtle: management values this person’s views more than another’s; or a particular employee is bolder because he knows he is being paid on the upper end of his market range. Meanwhile, people who are being paid less than their contribution is worth may be holding back. Why should I be investing more in my employers than they’re investing in me?

Thus, by paying an employee less, you are actually making her contribution less valuable.

Thus it isn’t a matter of paying women equally, but valuing women equally. Women who move forward with the knowledge that they are paid equally, and men who encounter women with the knowledge that they are paid equally, will both value the contributions of those women more. And because these contributions add a diversity of perspective–and those perspectives are valued at the same level as their male peers–they contribute value to the end product.

Thus, equal pay is simply logical from a business standpoint. The same rationale applies to equal pay for people of other cultures, subcultures, or anyone who enters a business environment with a new perspective. Short-changing a perspective leaves it anemic; and starving an investment, like your investment in an employee, is bad business.

How to Use Your Diversity

We intuitively know there’s value in diversity: the Mission Impossible team, the A-Team, Ocean’s Eleven, the Guardians of the Galaxy.

But in business the tradition has been to focus on things that can be tabulated: years of experience, education level, predefined skill sets–and usually to fill the abstract concept of a “position.” In this context, “diversity” is a buzz word that means “someone who looks different”–different clothes, different rituals, different language–but someone who is still plugged into the same ways of thinking.

It’s not that such people don’t add diversity. But the value of their diversity is often suppressed in favor of the appearance of diversity. The game, while at the office at least, is conformity.

The value of diversity comes with different modes of thinking. Any given person can see a problem from multiple angles, but never from all angles. Having and utilizing real diversity, then, depends on being able to bring out the difference in perspective and put it to work in combination with other perspectives.

From a recruiting perspective, this means hiring to fill the blind spots. A blind spot is different from a role, and it behooves a manager to understand where blind spots may exist in a team.

From a management perspective, this means practicing constructive conflict. Constructive conflict is a way not only to allow but to encourage dissenting opinions in such a way that final solutions benefit from very different ideas.

Finally, it means management that is able to see the value in other perspectives. Much of the value of these perspectives may not be rational, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t reason behind them. Finding tools to judge these perspectives, and to incorporate them together, is critical to effective management of diverse teams.

One final point: Diversity of perspective must be unified by unity of purpose. Last week, I described founding myth in terms of shared origin, shared values, and shared destiny. These are critical to the development of a diverse community.

This One Neat Trick Made Alexander the Conqueror of the Known World

Alexander conquered the known world with a simple innovation. It didn’t require a complex new technology; we would call it a “process change.” Instead of giving men shields to protect themselves, the Greeks overlapped their shields to form an impenetrable barrier, a technique they called a “phalanx.”

In these phalanx formations, a soldier’s shield was (according to Gerard Butler) intended to cover himself and the man to his left. The success of the entire formation rested on each individual, but the responsibility of each individual extended to only one other person. It was a manageable, achievable, even simple goal. What’s more, each soldier was able to give up some of his own shield with the knowledge that the man beside him was shielding him in turn. (Unless you were on the far right–that guy was kinda screwed.)

I’m sure someone has taken this idea somewhere, slapped it on a posted and put the word “TEAMWORK” under it. But this isn’t just “teamwork.” “Teamwork” was taking down a mammoth thousands of years earlier. The phalanx was something a little different. Instead of being something abstract like “teamwork,” it was a very simple, practical invention based on two rules:

  1. Each man covers the next man’s weakness.
  2. Covering the man next to you is as important as covering yourself.

If you could apply this technique to a culture–the culture of your immediate team at work, or of your entire company, or of an entire nation–a culture of covering the person to your left–could that culture benefit as much from its resulting unity as an ancient Greek phalanx?

For it to work, there is a hiring issue and a management issue.

The hiring side depends upon hiring a diverse set of people–not just “diversity hiring,” but hiring people with very different perspectives and strengths within the context of the core set of skills necessary to a team. This requires complementing working skills (such as project planning) with social skills (such as empathy).

The management side depends upon horizontal management methods, which is to say peer management. Rather than being responsible only upward, I am also responsible sideways to and for one or more people. Their success is my success.

There are a few possible approaches that I have not personally had the chance to test or observe in a business environment. One is the “linked chain” approach that is seen in some less-formal organizations: Each individual reports to one peer and is reported to by another. (This is a way of placing responsibility for communication on one individual in the relationship; it doesn’t mean the reportee won’t also be asking for help from the reporter.) Instead of seeing these people as higher or lower in the hierarchy, they are peers who are responsible for one another. In a managed organization, the chain can be more effectively “linked” by pairing complementary skill sets, so that one’s strength can cover another’s weakness. By virtue of linking, additional skill sets can quickly be brought in by the rest of the team, especially on larger teams.

Have you had any experiences trying to develop “phalanx” structures in your organization? I would love to hear about it in the comments.